The Month in WordPress: May 2015

May has, yet again, been a fairly busy month for WordPress. The biggest news, for us internally as well as for the community as a whole, has most definitely been our acquisition by Automattic and everything that entails.

There’s no need to go over all of that again, of course, although we’re always listening if you have additional comments, suggestions, or feedback you’d like to share. In the meantime, let’s move on to everything else that has been going on this past month.

HostPress announced

Due to the generally poor state (and high costs) of hosting control panels that are currently available, Dan Griffiths has started work on an open-source alternative that is set to be based on WordPress. To fund the project, he is asking for $175,000 via Indiegogo. This makes it the most expensive crowd-funding project in the WordPress community to date.

It’s certainly an interesting project that I will be keeping a close eye on. You can read more about it, and also get some interesting views from the community, in this WP Tavern article.

WordPress 4.2.2 released

Security and maintenance releases are becoming pretty standard news these days, but the fast turn-around time on security fixes coupled with the automatic update system is something that is always impressive. WordPress 4.2.2 was released on 7 May and it addressed two security concerns.

If you haven’t read the post (or watched the talk) yet then I highly recommend that you do so, as it gives insight into how a significant security fix was handled in complete secrecy. It’s fascinating.

Metadata API project reborn

If you have ever worked with custom fields and the metadata API, you’ll know that there are many implementations of this and infinite ways in which to handle the UI and processing of post fields. After a project to flesh out this API was put on hold two years ago, it has now been reborn under Scott Kingsley Clark’s leadership, and looks set be included in core relatively soon.

This will be a significant improvement for plugin developers, and will go a long way to ensuring that all plugins have a consistent UI and when adding custom fields to posts.

WordPress celebrates its 12th birthday

27 May was the 12th anniversary of the launch of the first version of WordPress (v0.7). While this is somewhat of a routine milestone, it is still worthy of celebrating. Joel Spolsky says that good software takes 10 years to develop, and I’m sure we can all agree that WordPress has most certainly proved itself to be (at least) “good software.”

Theme reviews are evolving

The WordPress Theme Review Team has started becoming much more strict on the “presentation vs functionality” guideline. There’s an interesting post on WP Tavern about the implications of this followed by a long (and somewhat heated) discussion about the effects of the crackdown.

The ultimate goal is to make the WordPress Theme Directory more valuable and consistent in terms of theme quality – a noble goal to be sure, but not one that will come without significant changes. Justin Tadlock has proposed some updates to build a curated theme directory, which has received some valuable and varied feedback.

I think something like this is a great step forward, but because changes to the directory will affect a lot of businesses it is one that needs to be carefully thought out and even more carefully implemented.

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Certainly an interesting project Dan is kicking off, would love to hear more about this, must follow up with him on his crowd funding page. Thanks for the round up Hugh, love to hear the news from around the community.